Cloudflare blocked service to Kiwi Farms, a notoriously transphobic forum with users that stalked, harassed, and doxed vulnerable people since it started in 2013, on Saturday, according to an announcement made by Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince. The decision follows weeks of public pressure for Cloudflare to drop its protection service to the site.
“We just blocked Kiwifarms,” Prince tweeted. “The threats on the site escalated enough in the last 48 hours that, in spite of proactively working with law enforcement, it became enough of an imminent emergency we could no longer wait for them to act.”
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Cloudflare published more details about this announcement on its company blog.
This comes just one week after Cloudflare defended the choice to keep the site as a customer.
In August, Twitch streamer Clara Sorrenti, known as Keffals, was the target of transphobic raiding and swatting—the dangerous internet harassment tactic involving prank calls to authorities that prompt police to send a SWAT team to someone’s home. Sorrenti alleges that Kiwi Farms members organized this attack, and has been campaigning for Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure company that protects Kiwi Farms from DDoS attacks among other services, to drop the website as a customer.
In place of the website is an error: “Due to an imminent and emergency threat to human life, the content of this site is blocked from being accessed through Cloudflare’s infrastructure.”
Kiwi Farms was reportedly founded with the purpose of trolling and harassing a webcomic artist, and has since grown to become one of the biggest message boards for harassing and targeting specific people and groups, especially trans people and women.
Cloudflare’s terms of use forbid “content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence, or is intended to defraud the public.” In the past, Cloudflare has removed service from vile websites, including neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer in 2017, and terrorist manifesto hotbed 8chan in 2019, effectively deplatforming and these websites and their members off the internet.
In 2019, Kiwi Farms founder Joshua Moon refused to cooperate with New Zealand officials when they requested he hand over information about posts related to the Christchurch mass shooting on the forum. It’s also allegedly been connected to several completed suicides by the people its users targeted. Following Sorrenti’s campaign to shut the site down and have Cloudflare drop it, more people have come forward on social media to share how the site’s members harassed and doxed them.
